PIA07665: Distant Shepherd

Gazing across the plains of Saturn’s icy rings, Cassini catches the F ring
shepherd moon Pandora hovering in the distance.

See PIA07632 for an up-close color view of Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Dec. 1, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.2
million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Pandora and at a
Sun-Pandora-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 116 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel on Pandora. The image
has been contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of two to aid
visibility.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.